All posts by Jango

Hallway Trap

Solved!

British, seen on TV mid 1970s, probably a weekly drama… two guys break into a stately manor at night for a laugh. They are walking along the upstairs corridor when suddenly the lights go on and an alarm rings. The guys run to the end of the corridor but a steel bar gate closes and blocks their way. They turn and run to the other end of the corridor but before they get very far another gate closes, trapping them inside the length of the corridor. The owner of the house appears in his nightgown and a philosophical discussion ensures about the haves and the have-nots. Eventually the guys tell the man he might as well go ahead and call the police. They aren’t two worried, the police will probably just give them a talking to and let them go. The man smiles and says actually he is heading away on holiday in the morning for a month or so and when he gets back he will probably discover the bodies of a couple of lads who broke into his house and succumbed to starvation… It dawns on the guys that things are not going to end well for them…

 

 

 

Plane Crash in Forest

Solved!

Seen on TV 1970s, probably American. A plane crashes in a remote forest and the survivors try to work out what to do. It finally dawns on them near the end of the movie that they actually all died in the plane crash and are probably in their version of Hell. The protagonist does not accept this fact until the very last scene when he hears his overweight and long dead wife running through the forest  towards the plane calling out his name. “Oh no!” he says as he realizes the enormity of the situation – he gets to spend an eternity here with his long dead wife!

Trap for a Solitary Man

I Don't Know the Name... (unsolved movies)

This 1960s film was seen on TV in the early 1970s. It is one of several film versions of the 1960s French play Trap for a Lonely Man.

First of all, the exclusions:

It is not Stranger in the House (1955).

It is not Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958).

It is not Trap for a Solitary Man (1963) (unproduced).

It is not Honeymoon With A Stranger (1969).

It is not One of my Wives is Missing (1976).

It is not Vanishing Act (1986).

A villa in a sunny coastal area, possibly Europe. A woman appears, claiming to be a man’s wife but the man does not know her. The police are called and a detective arrives but when the man gets his wedding picture it is the same woman that is in the photo not his wife. The man’s uncle arrives and there is hushed dialogue as the uncle confirms he has never seen this woman before either. The man is relieved that someone can back his story. But when the detective comes back to the villa the uncle now recognises the woman as being the man’s wife. What the hell is going on? At the end of the movie the man cries out that the woman can’t be his wife…

“Why not?” asks the detective.

“Because… I killed her…” he sobs.

Seen one afternoon in the mid 1970s, probably a film from the 1960s, I believe it was in b&w. There were several film versions of this story but other versions have a priest as a support character rather than the uncle, and some versions have swapped roles so that the man plays the imposter.

This is such a well filmed story I can’t understand why I can’t discover any mention of the particular version that I saw on TV in the seventies. Surely I wasn’t the only person to see it?

 

 

Teenage Girl Ghost

Solved!

This is an episode from a US TV show. A teenage girl in her upstairs room sees a guy outside washing the car but she cannot interact with him and wonders if he is in fact a ghost. Later she is with her family at the table but the room is all black & burnt and so are they. It turns out that she and her family are the ghosts. I saw this in the late 1990s (a couple of years before Nicole Kidman’s 2001 film “the Others” which has a similar twist).